Using ggplot - Interactive Bar Plots

Introduction

Sometimes, just having a chart isn’t enough. When working on the web, interactivity is key to capturing a user’s interest and attention. One simple way of doing so, is by adding a tooltip or hover effect to the data points. Not only is this great for the user’s attention, it helps with the readability of the data as well.

Basic Example

We are introducing a new library called ggiraph. This adds the interactive versions of the ggplot charts. All charts are suffixed with ’_interactive’.

One thing to note is the addition of ‘tooltip-HR,data_id=name’ to the aes(). This lets ggiraph know that HR is the value to display, and the unique value that the series is grouped by is name.

#import libraries
library(Lahman)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggiraph)

#store data into a variable named df
df<-Teams %>%
  filter(yearID == 1980) %>%
  select(name, HR) %>%
  arrange(HR)

#update field to be a factor, not chr
df$name<-factor(df$name, levels=df$name)

#Store the plot into a variable
g<-ggplot()+
  geom_bar_interactive(data=df,aes(x=name,y=HR,tooltip=HR,data_id=name), stat="identity", color="blue", fill="white")+
  ggtitle("HR by team in 1980 with ggiraph")+
  coord_flip()+
  ylab("Homeruns")+
  xlab("Team")

#display graph using ggiraph
ggiraph(code=print(g),hover_css="fill:blue; stroke:white")